Two Natures Within

October 4th, 2024
by Richard Sibbes

Or do you not know that your body is a temple of the Holy Spirit within you, whom you have from God? You are not your own.—1 Cor. 6:19

God, when he will humble a man, need not fetch forces from without. If he but let our own hearts loose, we will have trouble enough. If there were no enemy in the world, nor devil in hell, we carry enough within us, that, if it be let loose, will trouble us more than all the world besides.
We see the necessity of having something in the soul above itself. It must be a partaker of a more divine nature than itself; otherwise, when the most refined part of our souls, the very spirit of our minds, is out of frame, what will bring it in again? We must recognize in a godly man, a double self, one which must be denied, the other which must deny; one that breeds all the disquiet, and another that stills what the other has raised. The way to still our corrupt self, is not to parley with it, and divide government for peace's sake, as if we should gratify the flesh in something, to allow liberty to the spirit in other things; for we will find the flesh will be too encroaching. We must strive against it, not with subtlety and discourse, so much as with peremptory violence to silence and restrain it. An enemy that parleys will yield at length. Grace is nothing else but that blessed power by which our spiritual lives make progress against our carnal selves. Grace labours to win ground from the old man, until at length it be all in all. A good man has something in him that is wiser than himself, holier than himself, stronger than himself; there is something in him more than a man.
That which most troubles a good man in all troubles is himself, he is more disquieted with himself than with all troubles outside of himself. Where the spirit is enlarged, it cares not much for outward bondage; where the spirit is settled, it cares not much for outward changes; where the spirit is sound, it can bear outward sickness. Nothing can be very ill with us when all is well within.

Devotional Readings taken from Puritan Richard Sibbes 'Refreshment for the Soul.'
The Soul's Conflict with Itself, Works, vol. 1, pp. 160-61
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